Ian Bell on nuclear weapons

Here's the wall, old, thick and lovingly maintained. Here's your head, soft and spongy, on most days more or less empty. Just remember which of the two is liable to feel better when it ceases to make repeated contact with the other. Sometimes this is known as the democratic process. We have arrived, it turns out, at the 50th anniversary of the founding of CND. Some newspapers have been indulging in nostalgia for the days of duffel coats, trad jazz, Aldermaston marches, Bertie Russell, the Committee of 100, and Polaris. Others have struggled with a question: if a campaign reaches its half-century, are we celebrating heroic endurance and tenacity, or marking five decades of abject failure?

That wall endures. Trident will be "renewed". Sophisticated government analysis deems it imperative that we persuade the Americans to sell us billions worth of kit for the creation of hard radiation just in case someone else, somewhere, is lusting after similar equipment. Having paid our £30 billion deposit, we would, of course, only be able to use the machinery with American permission. That too is a democratic process, of sorts.

Meanwhile, the American friends still talk wistfully of small, inoffensive nukes, devices they could use "tactically" rather than genocidally. Meanwhile, knowledge of the ingenious devices proliferates. Iran's alleged ambitions become the stuff of nightmares while Israel's possession of the things - once known as cause and effect - is placed beyond discussion. This year an entire Afghan war is being excused, by some, as a campaign to prevent peasant zealots from going nuclear.

You hadn't heard? The domino theory is back in fashion, and back in the world of fission. It turns out, they say, that if Nato fails to cure or kill the Taliban problem Pakistan will be at risk. Pakistan has nuclear weapons. It has the things for no better reason than the fact that India has them. India has them, meanwhile, thanks chiefly to America's aid and assistance. For the sake of a geo-political check here, and a strategic balance there, non-proliferation was overlooked. And Afghanistan, like Trident, became "imperative".

CND goes marching on. I admire the durability of those skulls. I also admire the notion that decency is preserved in the world by the mere assertion of decent values. The campaign could even be entitled to claim an actual success: the devices may proliferate, year on year, but in half a century no one has dared to use one. Even bloody dictatorships can live without that sort of reputation. Even sophisticated semi-democracies can understand the consequences. So far, with some help from CND and the like-minded, so good.

The trouble is that unromantic advocates of rational defence, those disinclined to "go naked" into the conference chamber, would make the same boast. Britain's armed forces have been fighting somewhere in the world throughout most of my life. Everyone accepts that this is a pity. Some of them are sincere. The sort who would renew Trident will tell you, however, that the mere possession of a "nuclear capability" has done more to keep us safe in 50 years than any amount of pious CND rhetoric.

If an idea guides policy, it deserves our attention. The "balance of terror" might sound like a notion from a cheap Mafia movie - you whack us, we whack you - but that does not render it worthless. Apply moral standards to international affairs, meanwhile, and you might as well be talking about the Cosa Nostra: the differences, if any, are stylistic. If deterrence has worked - crudely, haphazardly, - doesn't that render CND a joke? Or, worse, a dangerous distraction?

No part of British policy was ever altered by marches or CND's moral agony. No British politician, on achieving high office, ever retained his or her disarming instincts. Through 50 years governments of all parties have rushed to purchase the latest Pentagon upgrade. The possibility of a truly independent British force de frappe, French-style, was discarded more than four decades ago as a costly indulgence. The point is that the disarmers had no influence, at any stage, over any of this. Ever.

We sleep, meanwhile, without fear of frying. Do Wilson and Callaghan, Thatcher and Major, Blair and Brown, not deserve credit for that? Do we merely carp if we ask how a renewed Trident can have any possible utility in the war on terror? After all, Vladimir Putin, cleansing Russia of its democratic frivolities, is testing new, smarter bombs. China reminds us that it can kill our satellites at will. Forget Israel: do you really want a strange little man in Tehran to be given the chance to prove that his god is greater, as an air-burst weapon, than yours?

CND, like Wystan Auden's poetry, has made nothing happen. You could say that it has made a minority feel better about themselves. You could add that it has simply left others to make the life-and-death choices. The Americans and the Soviets did not begin the charade of strategic arms limitation thanks to CND. The peace camps at Greenham and Faslane did not dissuade a single strategist. Dazed heads bounced from the wall, year after year. But so what?

Another anniversary is passing. Five whole years have elapsed since the great marches designed to dissuade Tony Blair from endorsing and embracing the Iraq adventure. We and 100,000 others took the Glasgow route on that bright, freezing morning. No big deal, really. "Another damned year," I remember thinking, "another bloody march".

Our son had already done the school walk-out. He had been involved - never heard of him, officer - in the Edinburgh Castle occupation caper. Yet looking back on the river of people flowing through Glasgow that morning, and not wishing to patronise anyone, I couldn't help myself. "You do realise," I said, "that this won't make a blind bit of difference?"

Of course he realised. Cynicism comes early, these days. So why march at all? Or why, for these purposes, indulge in one of those polite, even-handed discussions of the relative moral and strategic merits of disarmament versus deterrence?

Sod the strategists, then, and the patriots, and the actuaries of unending war. Some democratic habits make partisans of us all. CND's failure is a matter of record: the bombs, newer, bigger and better, continue to be made. The theory of mutually assured destruction continues to be espoused. With every finger crossed, we continue to escape the holocaust. So should we go back to sleep?

CND has achieved a very perverse kind of success. For five decades it has demonstrated that democracy is, too often, an elaborate fiction. The most recent example will do: Scotland does not want Trident. There is no available measure of public opinion that justifies this political choice. Yet the weapons will be imposed upon us. That much is certain. And therein lies CND's abiding justification.

The people make a moral case. They do not wish to be defiled by the machinery that placed blasted shadows on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They raise their voices, when allowed, and they are ignored, year after year, decade after decade. CND exists chiefly, I think, to say that this is an affront. Just like Iraq: not, not ever, in my name.

Feeble rhetoric, no doubt. All rhetoric is feeble when it deals with the hypothetical. But it is never as enfeebled as the language of those who claim need and necessity in the name of a multi-billion dollar killing device that - but of course - Must Never Ever Be Used. CND remains a quiet voice of sanity in a world with depleted supplies of that commodity.

For 50 years the campaign to retire nuclear weapons has stood as witness to vast, systemic failures of democracy. It, in turn, has failed and succeeded simultaneously. The bombs, like the weary persistent mutter of dissent, remain. Another generation, another march.